The Argentine conceptual artist known as the Andy Warhol of Buenos Aires recently celebrated her birthday in an interesting way.
Marta Minujin held her 70th birthday party at MALBA (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), but it wasn’t the usual birthday party. In fact, it was a wedding.
Both in celebration of her birthday and to raise money for the museum, Minujin married art itself in front of 300 guests.
For more than 50 years, Minujin’s conceptual art has brought life to Argentina. When democracy returned to Argentina in the early 1980s, Minujin created a monument to what was considered a victim of the a 7-year dictatorship: freedom of expression. In 1983, using 30,000 banned books, she created a full-scale model of the Parthenon in Buenos Aires.
In 2011, a similar structure named the Tower of Babel was built in Buenos Aires with books donated by locals, libraries, and from more than 50 embassies. In 2014, the Tower of Babel will be moved to Times Square.
She has also recreated the Buenos Aires obelisk from fruit cake and made the Venus de Milo out of cheese.
Minujin is set to have an exhibit open at New York’s Museo del Barrio in February of 2014, but her final work of art will be her death.
According to SmartPlanet:
For her death, she says she plans to create a large acrylic box, decorated with neon tubes, that will project her happenings. She will sit inside, surrounded by her bronze works. After she is given a lethal injection, a furnace under the box will burn and melt everything, leaving nothing behind but multi-colored ashes. It will be televised, she says. And she seems quite serious.
“I hope they don’t try to stop me. I can pretend that I’m not going to do it, and then I’ll do it,” Minujín says.
In the words of Minujin herself, “Art is everywhere.”
